Wesley Corpus

To Samuel Sparrow Date: LONDON, December 28, 1773. Source: The Letters of John Wesley (1773) Author: John Wesley --- DEAR SIR,--Upon the head of Authority we are quite agreed. Our guides are Scripture and reason. We agree, too, that preachers who ' relax our obligation to moral virtues, who decry holiness as filthy rags, who teach men that easy, palatable way to heaven, of faith without works,' cannot easily fail of having a multitude of hearers; and that therefore it is no wonder if vast numbers crowd Blackfriars church and the chapel at the Lock [William Romaine was Rector of St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, from 1766 to 1795. Martin Madan was Chaplain of the Lock Hospital, 1750-80; he published Thelyphthora, in favor of polygamy, in 1780]. There is also too ' just a ground for charging the preachers both there and at the Tabernacle with grievous want of charity.' For most of them flatly maintain all who do not believe as they believe are in a state of damnation, all who do not believe that absolute decree of election, which necessarily infers absolute reprobation. But none were induced to hear my brother and me or those connected with us by any such means as these: just the reverse. We set out upon two principles: (1) None go to heaven without holiness of heart and life; (2) whosoever follows after this (whatever his opinions be) is my 'brother and sister and mother.' And we have not swerved an hair’s breadth from either one or the other of these to this day. Thus it was that two young men without a name, without friends, without either power or fortune, 'set out from College with principles totally different from those of the common people,' to oppose all the world, learned and unlearned; to 'combat popular prejudices' of every kind. Our first principle directly attacked all the wickedness, our second all the bigotry, in the world. Thus they attempted a reformation, not of opinions (feathers, trifles not worth the naming), but of men’s tempers and lives; of vice in every kind; of everything contrary to justice, mercy, or truth. And for this it was that they carried their lives in their hands, that both the great vulgar and the small looked upon them as mad dogs and treated them as such; sometimes saying in terms, ' Will nobody knock that mad dog on the head'